Booking.com complaint: Customer service response to Booking.com reservation failure – 3970327372

I am writing this email in total disappointment with our recent booking with booking.com. We booked 2 days accommodation 12 months ago under booking reference number 3970327372. We had the 2 days
ed by yourselves and an email asking for our arrival time on the Friday evening. This booking was made so far in advance due to a major sporting event that we were attending and have been
training for over 12 months and knowing this is the busiest weekend of the year in this location booking this far ahead was a must.
On arriving at the property on the Friday evening, the Manager of the Sarayi Hotel could not find our reservation, even though we had an email ing the booking from Booking.com and asking for us to verify an arrival time which we responded to. The hotel
ed we were booked in for the Saturday evening but not the Friday so whilst our booking ation showed the ed 2 nights the Sarayi hotel only had the 1 night booked in their system.
On phoning booking.com for assistance the response I received was absolutely disgusting with the customer support person telling me to go and find alternative accommodation as the Sarayi was fully booked.
This was clearly a mistake by Booking.com but there was total disregard from the customer service representative. She was most unhelpful with total disregard for our circumstance. I insisted she find us accommodation as we had now been travelling for over 6 hours. We ed with the Sarayi hotel and your customer support representative that we were booked in for the Saturday night even
though we weren’t in their system for the Friday, so we agreed we would come back for Saturday as
the event was running on the Sunday morning. Your customer service representative then said she
would call us back in 10 mins with alternative accommodation. After 60 minutes of waiting, we gave up waiting as it was getting late and
found alternative accommodation ourselves as we had already waited long enough. At this point we had to drive back to Cairns which was a 40 minute drive. Ironically we booked this through booking
.com through my partners account so I have no idea why your representative couldn’t find anything.
On arrival at this accommodation, we finally got an email from your representative saying she had found accommodation, still no phone call and by this time we were absolutely exhausted and very
annoyed with booking .com let alone extremely distressed. I responded to the email saying we had sought our own accommodation and would expect to seek full reimbursement for the new accommodation as we
booked the original accommodation 12 months in advance when prices were normal. Booking in on the evening of the busiest weekend of the year cost us substantially more so I would expect you to
reimburse us that additional cost, for the sheer distress you caused us and the abysmal customer service.
So if that was not bad enough we headed back out the following morning to the original
accommodation to be informed that Booking.com had cancelled the whole booking and when we arrived back at the Sarayi the Manager who ed the booking the night before said booking
.com had indeed removed our booking off the system…..As you can imagine we are now at our wits
end with this whole process, I called Booking.com again, twice to be told the Sarayi had cancelled
the booking. This was a blatant lie as I had the manager in front of me and Booking.com rep on the
phone and the manager knew exactly where are booking was and was expecting us back. Your customer service put me on hold twice (over 60 mins on the phone each time and just did not come
back to the call)
This is the worst service I have ever experienced, and the assistance received was despicable, I have
been using booking.com for a long time and this is just unacceptable. Please review our ed booking and dialog with your customer services, I have also retained all correspondence should I need to reproduce it..
I would please ask that firstly you understand what an awful experience we received and acknowledge the failings of Booking .com over this weekend. Our accommodation costs were 3 x higher that the original booking so I would appreciate that you at least reimburse us the difference in out-of-pocket expenses plus the loss of travel time back and for and the stress for an event we have been working towards for 12 months. This totally ruined our weekend and has left us totally exhausted.
Booking .com in the past has always been very good so I am hopeful that you acknowledge what went wrong with this booking and make sure no one else experiences the same problems. I also hope that you will look after us in a way of an apology and reimbursement for the alternative accommodation we had to find ourselves.